Which is Better For My Business, Dedicated Server Hosting or Cloud Hosting?

Choosing between a dedicated server or a cloud hosting solution is an important decision for your company.

In the past, it was common for businesses to start off on a shared Linux server when first learning about web hosting and then upgrade to a dedicated server to support increased web traffic as the website scaled in growth.

Today, the new paradigm of cloud hosting means that businesses don’t necessarily need to follow this traditional path and can start building a website on a managed cloud plan with pre-integrated platform support for Varnish Cache, Memcached, Nginx, CDNs, etc. that previously would have taken many hours in developer time to build on a custom dedicated server independently.

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Elastic cloud solutions can scale to provide higher levels of web traffic support than a single dedicated server can provide and are increasingly becoming an essential aspect of keeping the most popular websites & mobile apps hosted online.

Private Cloud powered by VMware and NetApp delivers all the benefits of a traditional public cloud with the power, performance, and security of an isolated infrastructure on dedicated hardware.

About Cloud Hosting

Many of the new retail cloud web hosting plans available for small business website publishing support are based in web server network management software improvements derived from “big data” in enterprise corporations where the scalability requirements of the largest websites in the world are the responsibility of DevOps teams in IT companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM as well as hosting companies like Liquid Web, Rackspace, and Amazon.

Many cloud VPS plans use a “pay as you go” approach rather than fixed rates for billing which allows them to scale to provide more CPU cores, RAM, or I/O processes on demand for web traffic spikes that can overwhelm shared hosting plans. Elastic cloud platforms manage multiple virtual servers and databases simultaneously, synchronizing changes across versions and caching web pages for anonymous browsers.

Cloud or Dedicated – What Should I Choose?

For most small business web hosting requirements, cloud hosting solutions offer web server resource scalability options that compete at the same price levels as dedicated server hardware for high traffic websites.

Many cloud platforms use a single web server stack software that will not support the custom software requirements of legacy web applications or databases, making dedicated server plans a necessity. In most cases, cloud hosting plans offer a “plug & play” PaaS option that small business owners can transfer existing websites to for better web server performance at scale with integrated page caching.

Dedicated servers provide base hardware resources that developers can custom install with the programming language extensions, tools, utilities, and third-party frameworks required to program complex, database-driven web and mobile applications. Over-provisioning dedicated server hardware for web and mobile applications can lead to better performance vs. shared hosting platforms based on virtualization with thousands of domain names active on a single server instance.

Advantages of Cloud Hosting

Although there are a wide variety of cloud hosting plans, platforms, and services, each unique to the company and programming team developing them for market, the main advantages of these plans are that they provide pre-installed elastic web server support with custom stack software optimized for CMS websites running on LAMP.

Cloud hosting allocates more RAM, CPU cores, & I/O processes to CMS websites than shared hosting plans while allowing each site to scale to consume more resources on-demand, according to the web traffic requirements in live production. This ensures that websites remain “always on” under any web traffic conditions and that web pages will load faster under normal conditions of community use.

Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting

The disadvantages of retail cloud hosting under the PaaS model compared to a dedicated server plan is that systems administrators or web developers may not have the full flexibility required to modify the webserver stack software installation in order to build custom solutions.

For example, there is no ability to change the operating system or install alternative webserver platform software like Nginx, Tomcat, Hadoop, Lightspeed, or Lighttpd on retail PaaS cloud hosting plans.

However, cloud hosting plans available under “pay as you go” approaches AWS, Google Cloud, & other companies do allow easy web server stack customization using snapshot services. Small business owners normally find managed WordPress hosting and retail cloud plans offered with LAMP PaaS options easier to use when transitioning from shared hosting for better performance, while the cloud computing plans offered with more stack flexibility require experience in systems administration and function similarly to VPS plans.

Disadvantages of Dedicated Servers

The main disadvantage of dedicated servers is that, under an unmanaged approach, systems administrators must be responsible for all aspects of web security that includes the operating system and all installed extension frameworks. Dedicated servers with a managed stack software environment are continually updated by remote technicians in the data center with security patches, but this can create data access issues with unregistered employees that are unacceptable to some business operations. The cost of leasing remote dedicated servers can even be higher than buying and provisioning the hardware locally, although it is difficult to replicate the speed of fiber optic network resources in a world-class data center or international colocation facility. Trust in the web hosting company includes reliance on a third-party team for support, technical assistance, and debugging in operations that can be mission-critical for business website support, but not every hosting company is guaranteed to be consistent in this at a level to be reliable, leading to a potential loss of business or occasional web server downtime that cannot be predicted.

Liquid Web Cloud Sites Service

Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites service is an excellent example of how managed cloud hosting platforms with elastic scalability is providing enterprise-grade solutions for small business and SMEs that are both cheaper and more powerful than dedicated servers. Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites platform is designed to work to optimize the performance of websites built with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP, & .NET through pre-installation of optimized stack software on the webserver. Elastic scalability is automated with Cloud Sites so that new server instances launch on-demand or as scheduled to meet the user requirements of web traffic spikes. Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites plans are more cost-effective than many dedicated server plans and also scales to support more web traffic under peak activity than dedicated hardware or VPS plans can manage. This can be vitally important for eCommerce websites that can lose business during peak sales periods like holidays, weekends, and special promotions unless a scalable web server framework is deployed. Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites plans can scale to support over 500 billion page requests per year on a fixed price monthly framework to illustrate how managed cloud hosting platforms are replacing dedicated servers for preferred use in support of web publishing, eCommerce, social media, and mobile applications.

Summary & Conclusion

Instead of moving from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server with more hardware resource allocations, business owners can now choose cloud hosting plans which scale to provide more CPU cores, RAM, or database instances automatically as required by web traffic (“elastic scaling”). When combined with a “pay as you go” approach or cheap fixed-rate billing, this can be more efficient than estimating required server overcapacity manually to match peak hours with downtime levels of website traffic.

The most important aspect of web hosting for many business websites is the ability to install a custom web server software stack platform to support needed third-party programming language and database extensions for complex web and mobile applications with custom code. Dedicated servers were traditionally the way to go, but cloud computing options are becoming increasingly more competitive alternatives for building small business software solutions at an affordable price.

It is now possible for small businesses and SMEs to host their websites with elastic server capabilities on retail PaaS cloud hosting plans at a fraction of the cost of comparable dedicated hardware and with the same enterprise quality services the largest companies in the world use to maintain their daily internet operations at scale.